Debating Affect

November 23, 2012

Let me begin by posing a simple question: Why are so many scholars today in the humanities and social sciences fascinated by the idea of affect? In an obvious sense an answer is not difﬁcult to ﬁnd; one has only to attend to what those scholars say. “In this paper I want to think about affect in cities and about affective cities,” geographer Nigel Thrift explains, “and, above all, about what the political consequences of thinking more explicitly about these topics might be— once it is accepted that the ‘political
decision is itself produced by a series of inhuman or pre-subjective forces and intensities.’”